Writing Toward Healing
N C L R ONLINE
67
FINALIST, 2020 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY JANIS HARRINGTON
Bardo
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Keep his things, play his music, leave on lights, my sister’s Buddhist friend advises after the suicide, he’ll linger for forty-nine nights. Daily, they confer, Tsarina and Rasputin. Wary, I eavesdrop, want to warn, charlatan. It can’t be healthy: constant Tchaikovsky, or the staged pretense of her husband’s non-absence – brass lamp’s glow beside his chair, a glass of Chilean red, book open to last page read. Available for his ethereal touch: razor on sink, towel on hook, socks curled in balls – and on their bed, unaided by sleeping pills, alert for a sign or caress, his wife – denied a goodbye, left behind in this life.
Suspended (mixed media on paper, 44x57) by Rebecca Aloisio
JANIS HARRINGTON’s collection of narrative poems, Waiting for the Hurricane, won the 2017 Lena M. Shull Book Award, given by the North Carolina Poetry Society, and was published by St. Andrews University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies, including Tar River Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press, 2009), Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Kakalak, Hermit Feathers Review, Flying South, and Orchards Poetry Review.
REBECCA ALOISIO earned her BFA in sculpture from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA from Syracuse University. She has held residencies at both the Penland School of Craft in Bakersville, NC, and the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, NC. Aloisio currently teaches in the College of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant and has had solo exhibitions at the University of Rochester, the Schweinfurth Art Center, and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. See more of her work on her website.